You aren't wrong - we've vacillated between personal and cloud(mainframe, shared, or centralized) for many years now and it seems that we'll probably continue on this hybrid approach for a while.
Personally I prefer to own my own compute, my own storage and my own hardware. Cloud isn't any cheaper in the aggregate long-term, but it does spread risk and costs across a longer term.
Considering everything I'd rather own the risk and up-front costs just for my own privacy and self-determination.
I don't need to own a fast workstation unless I want to continuously train my models. I can, however, quickly get a cloud instance that's much larger than that and train the model at a fraction of the time and cost of a desktop workstation.
And continuously training models is very hard, practicality in RL environment, even then cloud services over long term is possibly more cost effective solution, then hosting your own small cluster (few tightly packed racks).
I suspect the cloud has a decade, maybe less, of hype to grift on.
Huge data sets on a personal computer and opt-in data sharing with business and healthcare, etc will be the new norm.
Further out, software as we know it will cease to exist as entirely custom chips per application are the norm. IN TIME.
New hardware wars to capture consumer attention incoming.